How to Improve in a Flash : Ducks Finnish What They Started Day Earlier When Trading Began

To the thousands of Ducks fans who actually made it to Wednesday night’s game at the Pond, job well done.

It couldn’t have been easy, picking yourselves off your living room floors, applying the cold compresses, ordering out for smelling salts and composing yourselves in time for a 7:35 p.m. faceoff after you were given the news.

Teemu Selanne to the Mighty Ducks.

When I first learned of it, on a phone message from my editor, I immediately called him up and asked him to repeat what he had just said.

After that, I decided to lie down for a few minutes.

Teemu Selanne to the Mighty Ducks.

This had to be a joke, right?

Teemu Selanne, Proven NHL Superstar. Duck executives are allergic to those, aren’t they?

Teemu Selanne, 1993 NHL rookie of the year after scoring 76 goals and 132 points in his first season with the Winnipeg Jets.

The Ducks are midway through their third NHL season and their all-time leading goal scorer, the just-traded Bob Corkum, ended his Anaheim career with 48 goals and 82 points.

Paul Kariya, as good as he’s been in his 99 games as a Duck, has career totals of 46 goals and 102 points.

Selanne out-did that in his first regular season, then added 25 goals and 54 points in barely half a season in 1993-94 (he missed 33 games with a torn Achilles’ tendon), then added 22 goals and 48 points in the NHL’s mini-season of 1995, then added 24 goals and 72 points in Winnipeg’s first 51 games of 1995-96.

So he comes to the Ducks, at age 25, with 147 NHL goals in the equivalent of three full seasons--more goals than the career totals of Duck front-liners Mike Sillinger, Steve Rucchin, Shaun Van Allen, Joe Sacco, David Sacco, Valeri Karpov and Alex Hicks . . . combined.

Those are the facts, plain and simple.

More difficult to fathom:

Just how on Disney’s green planet did such a thing happen?

Selanne is everything Mighty Duck Hockey, to this point in time, is not.

He’s rich. (Only Kariya, and certain Duck executives, can make the same claim.)

He’s famous. (Kariya’s getting there; after him, the best-known Duck is Wild Wing.)

He’s a world-class talent. (Ron Wilson now has to buy books to learn how to coach one of those.)

He’s a three-time NHL all-star. (The Ducks haven’t had three NHL all-stars in their entire history.)

He’s not Frank Banham or Jim Campbell or Fredrik Olausson or Chris Herperger or David Karpa or Oleg Mikulchik. (We were beginning to think those were the only kind of deals Jack Ferreira knew how to make.)

He cost the Ducks more than Robert Dirk or Terry Yake. In fact, he cost the Ducks two of their three supposed “untouchables”--Oleg Tverdovsky and Chad Kilger--the No. 1 selections of their 1994 and 1995 drafts.

So what happened to Building With Youth, to Ferreira throwing his body in front of Tverdovsky and Kilger every time another general manager came calling, to the grand, exalted, venerated, all-encompassing Five-Year Plan?

The Five-Year Plan didn’t even make to the end of Year 3.

“You have your plan and you try to keep your perspective about it,” Ferreira said Wednesday, “but you don’t expect Teemu Selanne to become available.”

Ferreira found out by reading clippings from out-of-town newspapers, and had to blink more than once.

Selanne on the trading block?

Just approaching his athletic prime, on his way to a potential 140-point season, with the Jets about to move out of Winnipeg and their new home, Phoenix, setting its hockey promotional pitch to the tune of “Come See Teemu”?

It made no sense, but there it was in the papers, day after day.

“Finally,” Ferreira decided, “I said, ‘Well, I have to get in on this.’ ”

Wednesday will be remembered as the day the Ducks grew up as a hockey franchise, the day they were legitimized as a credible NHL entity. This, finally, is evidence that Disney might actually regard hockey as something more than filler between Wild Wing pizza runs and “Name That Tune” contests.

This is what the fans wanted. If not Wayne Gretzky at 35, how about Selanne at 25? (Add Gretzky: He still wants “his team” to go out and trade for a 50-goal scorer. The Kings traded for Kevin Stevens. The Ducks traded for Selanne. Hmmmm.) Tverdovsky and Kilger are outstanding young prospects, potential franchise cornerstones, but they could both go on to long and productive NHL careers and still not approach what Selanne has left in his.

This is also what Wilson wanted. Whether he knows it or not, Wilson had his contract unofficially extended Wednesday. Selanne gives Wilson some professional security, vocational insurance, and could keep Wilson coaching deep into April, when the 1995-96 Stanley Cup playoffs get underway.

This also makes David Sacco, for the time being, the luckiest man in professional hockey. Initially, Wilson plans to put Selanne on the same line with Kariya, with Sacco centering. Sacco, with 11 career NHL assists to date, could double that by the end of the Ducks’ upcoming four-game trip.

Selanne is a big-ticket item--very, very unusual for the Ducks--due to make $2.75 million this season. But the combined salaries of Tverdovsky ($2.1 million) and Kilger ($850,000) are $2.95 million, so Disney’s actually saving $200,000 on the deal.

Same old Ducks. Slashing payroll once again.